As a radiologist, I can assure you our specialty is not obsolete as many people have been suggesting since Vinod Khosla's hot take 10+ years ago.

If you don't understand medical imaging, when it's used, it's strengths/weaknesses/limitations, I can certainly understand why you would think it's easy for an AI to analyze the date/image and make the appropriate diagnosis. Unfortunately though, most imaging does not have an algorithmic yes/no answer and can have multiple not untrue interpretations given intrinsic limitations in imaging technology. This is where the "art" of radiology comes in - communicating what you can say, what you can't say, and what the next best steps are to answer the question in a way that a provider can understand. Yes AI at this point can identify things like brain bleeds, pneumothorax/pneumoperitoneum, lung nodules, and many other "findings". But it is not anywhere near actually catching all the findings, interpreting them in the clinical context, and making appropriate recommendations (and for the record a lot of radiologists aren't good at this either).

As AI gets better, I'll bet that it's role in radiology will continue along the same path it currently has - as a tool to assist us. In order to handle the continually increasing volume of scans that are ordered, we will need tools to help increase our efficiency while maintaining accuracy, and that's where I believe AI will come in.

This doesn't even take into account the procedural work I do as a rad - US/CT/Fluoro guided biopsies, aspirations, drain placement, ablations, etc. When AI gets to a point where it can do these for use... I don't think there are many medical subspecialties that will be safe. And whether we allow AI to get to that point is probably one of the biggest ethical questions we as a society will have to answer in the future.

Anyways, long rant over. Just tired of people who have no idea what an actual radiologist does say confidently and without real information that our specialty is obsolete and won't exist in 10 years (it's been 11 years since Khosla first said that and we currently have a pretty significant radiologist shortage in this country).

But hey, if people want to believe it I won't complain - gives us great job security.